Description
An insurance investigator romances a wealthy young beauty when he suspects she may be involved in fencing stolen jewels.
Laid back Seventies number in which insurance investigator Donald Sutherland tracks beautiful diamond fencer Jenny O'Neill across Miami and the Bahamas. Replete with sunshine, fast cars and double crosses this suffers from at times slowing to walking pace when it needed to run.
Sutherland, in a lackluster performance, is an insurance company detective battling a gang of jewel thieves for possession of $3 million worth of diamonds. Lots of fast-moving car chases and slow-moving pickup scenes between Sutherland and O'Neill. It's Duvall, fresh off his Academy Award-nominated performance in THE GODFATHER (1972), who makes the picture worthwhile. Unfortunately, his role is far too small. Lucien Ballard's fine camerawork (his 101st time behind the camera) is the next best reason for watching.
tries to be slick
Andy Hammon (Donald Sutherland) steals a diamond necklace from a criminal type. He's a newly hired mechanic working for Paul Booth. He gets fired after flirting with the bosses' daughter Paula Booth (Jennifer O'Neill). They get into a car chase and he offers her the $3M necklace. It turns out that the Booths are fences working with Peter Brinker (Eric Braeden). Police detective Ford Pierce (Robert Duvall) is frustrated with Andy Hammon who is actually working with the insurance companies looking to collect his 10%.
It's a lot of Florida. It's a lot of sunshine and water. It's trying to be a stylish thriller. It seems to be spending a chunk of change. Sutherland seems to be playing around with the material. It has the potential but it ends up as a muddle. There are questionable choices all the way through the movie. I don't know why they are measuring the jewels in a moving RV other than injecting some unnecessary action. I don't know why the plot goes from Florida to Chicago. I'm never certain what is happening at any one time. I look up director Tom Gries and am not surprised that he is mostly a TV director. He's trying to give the visual style but doesn't have the skills to pull it off. That's the movie in a nutshell. It's trying to be a flashy big budget thriller but it doesn't have it.
Strictly for Jennifer O'Neill fans
Jennifer O'Neill became a star as the distant object of Gary Grimes' voyeuristic attention in the wonderfully nostalgic Summer of '42. That film showed that she could be captivating when viewed from afar, but her career went off the rails while she was still in her twenties owing to a shortage of technical chops. Simply put, she had the looks of a movie star but not the presence. Here we see Jennifer driving around Miami in a 1970 Maserati Ghibli, taking a late night swim, sunning herself in a bikini, flying off to the Bahamas... Mansions, speedboats, planes and jewels provide the rest of Lady Ice's eye candy. It's all very appealing to look at, but herein lies the problem. The movie is all surface gloss with nothing underneath to drive the wheels. Someone forgot to tell the producers that heist movies are crime thrillers, and crime thrillers are plot driven. They need tight pacing, high stakes, plot twists, none of which appear in this film. The only action is provided by a little routine fast driving. Otherwise, everything meanders along in predictable fashion. Some greedy people are interested in some jewels. No surprises here. The producers could have recut Lady Ice as a four minute music video or an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and lost nothing.
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